RBC Debuts Pimped-Out ‘Pour-Over Bar’; Stumptown Hits the Whitney

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If you’ve just finished wrapping your mind around in-house ice harvesting, now it’s time to focus those beverage-nerd brain cells on the morning quaff. RBC made headlines earlier this year with its $16,000 Slayer espresso machine, and now the Tribeca coffee shop has rolled out a new enticement for java geeks: a “Pour-Over Bar,” offering a veritable smorgasbord of brewed-coffee options.

There’s the Über-boiler, whose specialty, per a press release, is “uber-precise temperature control”; if you don’t give a hoot about that, how about a cup from the rustic woodneck, a dripper that uses a flannel “sock” to produce “a velvety mouth feel”? And don’t miss the high-tech Hario V60 Dripper, which does something fancy with a “spiral” and “turbulence,” much like your fourth-grade volcano science project; last, you might prefer the relatively straightforward aeropress, a sort of souped-up French press. If your mind is spinning as fast as the Hario’s air chamber, don’t fret — expert baristas are on hand to help you pair the proper roast with the appropriate brewing method.

But that’s not the only doodad-ery happening in the coffee world: Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group e-mails to say it’s now operating a coffee cart at the Whitney featuring Stumptown coffee and a La Marzocco Strada machine. Apparently, Stumptown didn’t trust FedEx with the gazillion-dollar machine, so employees drove it cross-country from the company’s Portland, Oregon, headquarters in order to ensure arrival in New York in tip-top shape. The full café, which was originally scheduled to open this fall, is now planned for spring, but no word on who (or what) will need to be driven cross-country before that opens.